Friday, June 5, 2009
Meeting the Work of Guy Maddin
I'm finding that the supplemental features on Criterion DVD releases are sometimes more valuable and substantial to me than the films they were intended to support. A late seventies documentary on Charles Laughton was meatier and much more interesting to me than David Lean's Hobson's Choice. It featured some great interview footage with his wife Elsa Lancaster, Billy Wilder and others exploring this very intriguing character full of paradox and contradiction. It also featured tasty facts such as the fact that primaries of the cast of Night of the Hunter (Robert Mitchum, Shelly Winters) were students of Laughton's in an acting school he had formed years earlier.
I tried connecting first with Maddin's film Brand Upon the Brain! on its Criterion release but it wasn't working for me. Brand is a modern silent film and a couple of attempts to get into its nervous, kinetic but often highly stylized energy had failed me. But I have always had issues with David Lynch's Eraserhead as well. So instead of going back to Last Time Played on my DVD player, I checked out an enclosed documentary about Madden and Brand called 97 Percent True and Madden to be a fascinating artist. Like Todd Haynes, Maddin is iconoclastic, well-studied in film and fearless to be truthful to the vision he wishes to put on the screen.
Maddin talks about the film as being biographically true in an emotional way. As George Toles, his University of Winipeg mentor and co-writer of Brand Upon the Brain! says Guy is someone "who is dreaming his way back to spaces that he has occupied uncertainly and in confusion in earlier parts of his life and trying to use film to figure out what was going on with them." It isn't showoffy but trying to get at mystery according to Toles.
Childhood recollections are important to Maddin. He talks about film influences of films like Sajiyat Ray's Panther Panchali, but also the literature of Bruno Schulz which completely and empathetically try to recreate childhood experiences. He uses terms like "delicious confusions." to describe the ways that memory changes over time.
Maddin watched Bunuel and Dali's L'Age D'or 60 times when he was 24. Primitive Surrealism and the pure horny obsessions of the first wave of surrealism spoke to him. Von Stroheim's Foolish Wives was another influence. In the documentary, Maddin talks about his I vitelloni lay about friends probably watched 100 times. He talked about how he became drawn in by the "arcane and surprisingly elaborate language of silent films." "It was important for me to be obsessed about these things." Melodrama in a kind of classic silent film sense plays a big role. As Toles describes it as "the form which most fully acknowledges the way in which movies echo the dream life." Or as Maddin calls it "truth uninhibited."
Basement, punk and do it yourself bands is another kind of influence for Maddin. He picked up a camera to make a movie the same way that a garage band musician picks up an instrument.
I must have been distracted in October 2007 to have missed checking out the tour of live production accompanying Guy Maddin's film Brand Upon the Brain that played in Portland that featured celebrity narrators, Foley artists and an orchestra. It must have been a helluva show. Meanwhile, I'm finding myself entranced by some of Maddin's shorts available for online viewing and, probably and someday, I will check out Brand Upon the Brain! again. I have a feeling Maddin is a filmmaker whose work will grow on one over time. This is the kind of artist that one needs to catch up a bit with.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:20 PM
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